Polygon rendering on a stream architecture

Abstract

The use of a programmable stream architecture in polygon rendering provides a powerful mechanism to address the high performance needs of today's complex scenes as well as the need for flexibility and programmability in the polygon rendering pipeline. We describe how a polygon rendering pipeline maps into data streams and kernels that operate on streams, and how this mapping is used to implement the polgyon rendering pipeline on Imagine, a programmable stream processor. We compare our results on a cycle-accurate simulation of Imagine to representative hardware and software renderers.